The paintings of Cristina Vergano offer a glimpse into a beautifully mysterious world. We feel that we want to understand this world but we don’t need to understand it, and it’s thrilling to teeter on that edge of unknowing. At times it seems as though the whole history of art is subverted here with such playful grace: The history of seeing oneself, of looking and of being looked at. But it really goes deeper than that, to what it means to be human, and deeper than that still, to what it means to move through this dream of a world and this world of dreams. We were so grateful to have the chance to ask Cristina a few questions about her work.

Mapgies: The world you create with your art is so remarkable. I found myself wondering what kinds of things you liked to draw or paint as a child or teenager. Did you keep a sketchbook? Do you have any of your early drawings?

Cristina Vergano: I don’t remember what subjects I used to draw and paint as a child,  but I know that I did a lot of it. 

As an adolescent, I became entranced with the many facets of women. All my notebooks and school book margins were covered with sketches of female characters: lean or plump, sirens or hussies, languid or frivolous, powerful or timid, often sensual or overtly pornographic. They were drafted in a style heavily influenced by my early love for Old Masters’ drawings, all loose lines and cross-hatching. I wish I had them now; I think they were quite good. I also learned a lot by this intensive, self-driven, extended drawing course, which honed my draftsmanship. I remember that they were very fluid and free, almost stream-of-consciousness, because there was no pressure and no judgment. They were just a game between me and myself, a direct expression of my thoughts, fantasies, and preoccupations. These were the same ones that all adolescents have, worldwide: understanding this new body that’s thrown upon you, that you never asked for, and you really never saw coming. “What are these embarrassing fleshy mounds growing on my chest? Can I hide them?” And immediately afterwards: “Wait. Are they big enough? Are they too big? ”  As you can imagine, breasts were a frequent subject of my visual explorations.

The little women in my drawings also helped me to dissect society’s codes of behavior and rules concerning the sexes, to try to understand the puzzle of the mating game and the myriad ways of being a woman. 

They were sadly lost to my mother’s house-clearing purges.

I’m struck by the series of paintings of women painting. Though they’re nude, they don’t seem the least bit vulnerable. They seem strong, confident, completely unselfconscious, even though they’re being watched by the face in the sky. Is this because they have the brush? Because they’re rendering the eye that’s watching them? There’s such a feeling that they own this world, this ideal unspoiled world that’s before man or after man or aside from man. Can you talk a little about these paintings?

My little naked women in the “I Paint what I See“ series (Eye in the Sky) are indeed feeling safe in the hyper-serene, almost formulaic, Eden they inhabit alone. Except that they are not alone: an immense creature is peeking at them over the distant mountains. But -wait!- that creature is us, the viewer, reflected in the mirror that is the background. Undaunted, the little artists include the gigantic eye in the sky in their work, in a literal, humorous take on realistic painting. They make me laugh every time. 

Also, the gigantic eye is a normal part of the landscape to them. Pushing this concept further, one could wonder if there is some clue of cosmic proportions we are missing, being beatifically unaware of a much bigger picture, like ants building their nest next to a highway.

I love the idea of the mirrored background being an element of the landscape. It brings the viewer into the strange and beautiful world of your paintings. But also in a way it opens a door between you, the creator, and the viewer. What are the ideas behind this method?

Indeed, the painting’s self-containment is broken by my using a mirror as the sky. I love how people respond to it, how this makes the viewer feel involved in the painting. Does this happen despite or because this stratagem is extremely low-tech? Who knows. 

It reminds me of how the element of dazzle and surprise was sought in the art of the Baroque period. The classical balance of the Renaissance gave way to the Baroque period’s aesthetic of wonder, often realized through the devices of illusionism and trompe l’oeil, among others.

In fact, many of your figures are naked, but they rarely seem abashed or frightened. I was wondering if this is, in part, because they often have animal heads. They radiate with the sense of enjoying the strength and vitality of their bodies, but in the way that animals do, with no shame or worry, no idea of needing to change the way they are. This feels like a way to upend centuries of art history, and of the way women see/are seen. What is the role of nudity/clothing in your work?

Strolling through any historical European palace or museum, nudity is so pervasive in paintings,  sculptures, and frescoes that it would make you think that everyone ran around naked all the time. Not so. 

Nudity and sexuality were regarded with cool equanimity in Classical antiquity,  and the Renaissance tried to aspirationally adopt Classical philosophies and aesthetics. But the din of Christian values rang in the background, like thunder at a picnic, and the guilt-free enjoyment of nudity and sexuality was no longer possible. I am convinced that the Medici,  and other similar early robber-barons,  gawked at their brand-new frescoes and paintings thinking: “Can you believe I get away with looking at boobs and butts every day, like it’s normal? There’s my latest lover, Fiammetta, represented as a procacious Venus.  Ha ha!”

And this is how I  think of my unclothed subjects, in this era balanced between religious revivals, conservatism, and internet porn accessible to all: on the surface, my nudes harken back to an age of classical innocence, and yet they savor a nut of malice and naughtiness, as they think, with the decadent Duke of Parma: “Am I really getting away with this?” 

And having a bird head, as everyone knows, allows one to get away with ever so much more. 

I generally refrain from making overtly ideological art,  because I think it often ends up being simplistic, and poorer for it. 

However, my Bitches series is an exception to that rule, as it is decidedly feminist in inspiration, as the name suggests. These paintings are allegories of women’s roles in a traditional society.

“Fetch the Bone, Good Little Bitch” (disguised in Latin: ossum adduce, catula bona) shows a dog with a little girl’s head having gotten hold of a gigantic bone,  and looking up hopefully and expectantly for directions.

“The Amazing Bitch” (circus bitch) portrays a dog’s body with a young girl’s head. She is balanced on her hind legs, and wears a clown hat, but her expression is subtly self-possessed.  You know that even though she has to play the game,  nothing can touch her core, because she knows who she is. 

“Between Hope and Fear” (in Latin: inter spem et metum) shows another little girl with a dog’s body, bearing an expression that I always found heartbreaking in children,  precisely between hope and fear. 

I am not sure whether they fit any school of painting. Like all of my work, they stand on the shoulders of giants: I consider my work a grain of sand in the continuum of millennia of art, which is humbling and comforting at the same time.

Speaking of understanding/not understanding, your paintings are so fantastically intriguing. The symbols, words, background details – the whole thing often feels like a puzzle to solve (this is particularly evident in your rebus paintings). Do you want people to “solve” your paintings or is it enough that they puzzle over them. Do you want us to find the answers or is discovering the questions enough?

I think of my paintings as an all-you-can-eat buffet.  One can savor small samples of many dishes, or only desserts,  or only choose vegetarian dishes. Each person will leave with their impression of the place, based on their choices. 

Any work of art, once completed, has to be released in the world, and must stand on its own merits. Even without commentaries, critical reviews, or explanations on the part of the author, it has to communicate with the viewer on some level. And that level depends on the viewer, on how receptive they are to the artist’s specific language. 

Because I’ve had a love affair with the past since early childhood, my paintings are layered with historical and literary references and symbols.  But you don’t have to understand them all in order to relate to the work. That is true for any work of art, as it is for people. You can like a person and feel kinship with them even if you don’t know about their lonely childhood and their liver condition. But if you learn about those things,  you will probably like them more, because you will better understand them. 

The texts I often include in my paintings are disguised by levels of obfuscation: they are not in English, or they might be reversed. 

I do this because I love text as a graphic compositional element, but I don’t want an easy reading of it to provide a too-facile interpretation of the painting.  

So in a way, yes, my paintings are puzzles to solve. I think art has to hold something back, and I love hiding behind the veil of my reticence.

I love the bird-headed creatures. They seem so knowing and amused, buoyant but substantial, up to their own mysterious and possibly frightening joys and rituals. What is their world like and how does it overlap with our world.?

I’m not sure I can answer this question very cogently, because I have not fully analyzed where the bird creatures come from. Certainly they are some sort of alter ego of mine, as well as allegorical women. They inhabit their own flawless, nocturnal Arcadia, or maybe, just maybe, they are playacting a stylized pantomime against a theatrical set and painted backdrops.

I purposely try not to dig too deep, regarding the meaning of these paintings. Watching Federico Fellini and Ingmar Bergman movies with my father,  as a child, taught me to be comfortable with the cryptic and the symbolic. I didn’t quite understand, for example, the image of La Saraghina doing an awkward dance on a deserted beach, in Fellini’s 8 1/2, but I LIKED it. 

And the same goes for my bird creatures: I don’t quite understand them, but I do like them.

“Art” in Jerry Saltz’s words, “is one of the greatest operating systems human beings have ever invented to explore consciousness.” Well said, Jerry.

Eyes are recurring symbols in your work, and they ask all sorts of questions about seeing/being seen, about the power of looking. I think this is particularly true of creatures with an eye for a head, which to me equates looking with thinking, with being alive. There’s a sense that you’re creating a mythology all your own, though drawing on the stories and patterns common to many philosophies. Do you think about the world of your art as having a unifying mythology?

I deeply love all the strange creatures in my Pantheon, but for now I don’t worry about unifying anything in my work.  Maybe I’ll think about that when I grow up. 

It’s quite the opposite: lately I’ve been flirting with my different interests and styles as I wish, in a painting binge. It’s like being a kid in a candy shop, a great indulgence and a lot of fun. 

In the past I have worried about maintaining stylistic coherence in my paintings, and censored myself in order to produce a unified body of work. But no longer: I explore different things, and I vaguely trust that the unifying element will emerge to be me. 

I’m always fascinated by the life of an ex-pat. You moved to the U.S. from Italy – do you feel like this gives you a way of looking at society from a different and maybe sharper angle? Your work exists in a marvelous world of its own, but many of the ideas you address and questions you raise are very much rooted in the real world, Do you think being between worlds, in a way, or exposed to a larger variety of people and things than many others are affects the world of your art?

Italy, before the internet unified so many aspects of culture and society, was a different universe from the US. Having grown up there and, I might add, as a fairly geeky child, has allowed me to see American society with a fresh point of view than I would have if I had been born and raised in the US. And by the same token, now I see Italy with a fresh eye. It’s a superpower that I never want to lose. 

I was also exposed to history, which is ever present and unavoidable in Europe, and that also gives you a sense of perspective: people in the past thought differently and lived differently from us, but in a way they were just like us. And that knowledge has the effect of offsetting our lives in a very rich way.

I grew up about an hour out of NYC and we used to go into the city a lot back in the late 80s/early 90s. There was always a feeling that anything was possible, especially in the worlds of independent film and music. There was a sort of rough beauty, a true independence, a use-what-you can-to-make-something-fine spirit. What was it like to live there at that time? What was the world of visual art like? Do you feel that it’s changed?

When I came to NYC in the 90s, I experienced the tail end of that mythical period in NYC, and it was grand, in the sense that there seemed to be great freedom. Like the great Penny Arcade says, in “Longing Lasts Longer”: “You knew back then that you could always find a sanctuary, some place in nyc that would be yours alone” (I’m paraphrasing). But these days, it appears that you can only find it if you work two jobs and share an apartment with five roommates. Which, of course, leaves no time, physical space or energy for making art.

In the early 90s I found an art studio for rent in the basement of an 1864 loft building in Tribeca. It was large and it was cheap — I took it. My space was rough, with 19th-century stained plaster walls and wood paneling bearing some 100-year-old graffiti, ancient plank floors repaired with flattened tin cans, original wavy glass windows with great, heavy iron exterior shutters, and massive cast iron columns supporting the floors above. It felt like you would be safe down there even in a nuclear war. And it was mine. I couldn’t believe my luck.

The quirky landlord lived in the building and ruled over it like a feudal lord. Most of the loft tenants, myself first and foremost, scattered like mice when he appeared. But over time we got to know each other, and I learned that Edward Enck had a big heart, under the foreboding exterior, and a deep love of art. I rented my art studio from him for over twenty years, and the already low rent never increased. For all that time my large basement studio had been a constant in my life, my true home and my rock through many changes in my life: apartments, lofts, husbands…. 

Edward ultimately passed away,  and I now have a different studio in Manhattan,  but I owe Edward a huge debt of gratitude, as the most influential patron of my work and a dear friend. Thank you,  Edward. If I am ever a ghost,  I will roam with you, in that grand cast-iron building on Duane Street. 

Some of the “real world” issues you address are evident in your paintings on traffic signs, which examine ideas about vulnerability, abuse, the destruction of nature or beauty or of the very earth with a strong urgency. Can you talk a little about the ideas behind these paintings?

My Traffic Sign paintings, like the Bitches series, originate in ideology, but only in the sense that the message is direct and strong. 

Some feature stark grisaille portraits of women and children painted on used, real-life STOP and DO NOT ENTER signs. They deal with the immigration problem, the Me Too movement, abuse and human rights. 

The idyllic landscapes painted over STOP and ONE WAY signs try to be a reminder of the destruction of natural environments.

I enjoy the wink to pop art and street art implied by the use of street signs, as well as the pop of color and the graphic element’s interplay with traditional oil painting. The grittiness of the signs is an interesting element, as well, and it creates a nice juxtaposition with the perceived “preciousness” of oil paint.

I briefly toyed with the idea of replacing actual, blank New York City traffic signs with my painted ones, but the technical and logistical aspect of that seemed daunting. 

Your work contains a combination of classically beautiful elements with surreal or even grotesque elements (a demure young woman with an elephant’s trunk, for instance) and this seems to question the very nature of beauty (and, in fact, the idea of natural beauty). What is your idea of beauty in art, life, people? What’s the connection between those things for you?

The classical balance that inspires Renaissance art made an indelible mark in my 5-year-old brain. My concept of beauty is informed by that balance. Everything else that I have absorbed since is grafted onto that foundation: art history, literature, Latin poetry, images from advertisements and packaging, folk art, furniture design, philosophies, 19th-century portrait photos, fashion, what have you. 

Humor and irony, which first appeared overtly in art with Dada and Surrealism, are an important part of my aesthetic. I love the shift of perspective and the sense of displacement they generate in a painting. I think laughter is a spiritual, transcendent force, which carries us outside of ourselves.

At times I suspect I’m the only one who’s laughing at my paintings … In any case, I have WAY more fun than I should. 

Cristina Vergano (Italian, b.1960) is known for her paintings that blend Classical style with surrealistic, fantastical content. Her paintings contain layers of meaning, and are influenced by XVIII and XIX century art, with nods to Modern and Contemporary Art.  Born in Milan, Vergano’s early interest in the visual arts was nurtured by her family of painters and architects. She studied at the International School of Milan, the Liceo Classico Cassini in Sanremo, and the Universita` di Genova, where she obtained a degree in Letters and Art History. 

In 1996 Vergano had her first important solo exhibition in New York City, where she moved and found representation with New York City’s Woodward Gallery. She went on to have numerous New York solo gallery shows, as well as exhibiting at the Chicago Athenaeum, the University of Ohio, the Laguna Art Museum, the Art Museum at Florida International University, The Islip Art Museum, White Box, the City of Brea Art Gallery, the Decordova Museum, the Parrish Art Museum, the “Panorama Editions II” International Contemporary Arts Salon in Jodhpur India and the Anthropology Museum of the People of New York. Vergano was also commissioned to design successful lines of products for The Museum of Modern Art and the Liberty Science Center.

Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Art in America, Art News, Juxtapoz Magazine, Elle Decor, Art and Auction, Art & Antiques, American Arts Quarterly, Esquire Japan, and many other publications.  In 2014, she was featured, alongside Georgia O’Keeffe, Louise Bourgeois, Agnes Martin, and Yayoi Kusama in Blouin Art+Auction’s “Wise Buys: 50 Women Artists Worth Watching.” Vergano counts among her many collectors Whoopi Goldberg, Robert and Cortney Novogratz, and Madonna.

Vergano lives and works in New York City, where she is represented by the Leonard Tourné Gallery. She is presently painting for a solo exhibition at the Tourne’ Gallery in New York on April 24th, 2025. Find her work on Instagram at cristinavergano.